As I was chowing down on some Apple crumble the other day, I found myself musing on some of the aspects of Mac OS X Leopard that have impressed me in recent weeks.

TV Out That JustWorks(TM)

Given that watching stuff through TV-Out is one of the primary uses of my MBP, I consider this pretty darn important. OK so it cost $41 to get the TV adaptor, but it’s totally worth it. Set up the TV as an additional display, switch to PAL, turn on overscan (who wouldn’t?), drag VLC onto the other screen, maximize and hit play. That’s it. The quality is absolutely superb and it shits all over my old HP’s TV-out. Colours are vibrant, and the display doesn’t go to sleep half way through the video (though that may be VLC’s doing, I’m not sure). The adaptor has dual outputs; composite and s-video so that’s also a plus.

Native Display Zoom

Being able to zoom the display using simple shortcut keys or mouse actions is a truly innovative feature. E.g. Ctrl-MouseScroll zooms to the current mouse cursor position, and the zoomed display pans the screen as you move the cursor. Or with the keyboard, Cmd-Opt-8 toggles zoom; zoom in and out with Cmd-Opt-plus and Cmd-Opt-minus respectively; and toggle smoothing with Cmd-Opt-\ (I have it on). This works a treat when watching widescreen videos on my TV through the adaptor. And in truth this feature is why I’m still using VLC to play videos on the Mac. In Media Player Classic, my video player of choice on Windows, you can zoom in and out with 9 and 1 on the numpad, or map to other keys. VLC however, has no such keyboard shortcut so I was forced to watch skinny widescreen videos half the height of my 4:3 TV screen. Then I discovered the OS X built in zoom and literally did a little dance around the loungeroom (watch on YouTube).

Custom Keyboard Shortcuts

Since Ubuntu, I’ve thought this is a feature that really should be built into all OSs. It’s just bloody handy to be able to map functions to keys that make sense to you, not just to the designers of the OS. E.g. I remapped “take screenshot” to Cmd-F7, the key with a little screen icon.

Native Disk Image Support

Mac OS X’s support for disk images has been one of the most impressive features I’ve seen so far in an OS. While I haven’t yet had a chance to explore the imaging support in great depth, certain features stand out. For example, you can download an ISO image and mount it straight on your desktop and have a look at the contents. DMG has become the default Mac archive format as well as being a flexible format used for both hard drive and optical disk images.

The Dashboard & Web Clips

The dashboard has suddenly become useful again with the introduction of web clips, which let you convert sections of web pages into dashboard widgets. Along side traditional widgets for date countdown, Internode usage, Gmail and iSlayer, I have web clips for the Elders weather forecast and latest BOM radar image which removes the hassle of opening a browser, loading the bookmark, etc. It’s just there when you hit F12. The only downside to the dashboard is that widgets can be designed to be any bloody shape under the sun, which sometimes makes it difficult to get a nice looking layout, but for the 5 seconds the dashboard is open, it hardly matters.

The Little Things

There’s loads of other simple innovations in OS X, e.g. when you rename a file with an extension, instead of selecting the entire filename, Finder selects all of the text before the extension so you are not constantly having to retype .jpg or whatever when you rename a bunch of files. Another one is the spotlight search box. Hit Cmd-Space and type the first few letters of the app you want to run and hit enter. It’s like Windows+R on steroids. I also love the Cmd-comma shortcut which brings up program preferences in almost every app.